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One of my all time favorites.

best movie i've ever seen.

Absolutely Brilliant!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Modern Romance is the most daring Albert Brooks film, and the funniest. He plays a film editor who is insanely jealous of his beautiful girlfriend. Even though the film is hilarious, it shares a similar dynamic with Raging Bull, which came out a few months before Modern Romance -- it focuses on a man who imagines his girlfriend is cheating on him, and yet it turns out not to be true. But even so, Brooks' character drives himself crazy with conjecture, imagining the worst. It is the flip side of trusting a girlfriend too much and then finding out she is sleeping with everyone.Modern Romance also reminds me of another dark drama, The Gambler from 1974, in which the protagonist is smart and charming but nonetheless seeks to sabotage himself with bad behavior. Why do people destroy themselves? Some people don't want to be happy, it seems. To get comedy out of this shows the genius of Brooks.Brooks' character, Robert Cole, is a successful film editor. We see him at work, and he is very creative and good at what he does. He is a control freak at work, making the most minute changes in the film he is working on, and he applies this same desire to control (to in effect "direct") his personal life. In a measure, he succeeds, because he is able to get his girlfriend to ultimately go along with what he wants, despite her misgivings -- and that's another issue to explore, why women fall in love with insecure or manipulative men and put up with their difficult personalities.Brooks is very brave in playing such a difficult character, and there is nothing warm and fuzzy about Robert Cole. Brooks never tries to get the audience to love him, whereas actors like Steve Martin or Robin Williams would try to take the hard edge off and make him lovable.Also impressive is Brooks spends a great deal of screen time by himself, talking on the phone, talking to himself, driving himself crazy and driving past his girlfriend's house, in effect stalking. He spends as much time alone as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. To turn all of this into comedy is a measure of Brooks' unique genius.

I do like Albert Brooks. As an actor. As a writer and director, his movies fall short of funny, happy to be amusing. Modern Romance is par for the course. Only in the exchange with Medowlark Lemon does the movie come close to explaining Brooks' neurotic obsession with his girlfriend: she's out of his league. We don't know enough to understand why she's with him; the movie is more interested in his antics. Not only is Brooks' character narcissistic, his movie is too. The foley scene, the shopping excursion, the Hollywood party are all deftly handled and expertly underplayed. I truly believe that Brooks can find the humor in anything. But he's satisfied with too little in his movies, and his disregard for structure (in his early films) is both curious and frustrating. It's as if he thinks he can get away with less if he doesn't seem to be trying as hard.Essentially, Modern Romance is a 60-minute monologue with some situational humor mixed in. Is he in love with her, or with himself? That may be the point, but that makes me neither marvel nor laugh.

MODERN ROMANCE is one of the great unsung film comedies. It's not for everyone, in that the comedy is possibly too close-to-the-bone for people who like their comedy nice and painless. But in the post-Seinfeld era, when Curb Your Enthusiasm is a cult favorite, it is looking more and more like Modern Romance was WAY ahead of its time.Real Life, Lost In America, and Defending Your Life are all great, but for some reason this film stands out to me as Mr. Brooks' greatest cinematic effort. (Stanley Kubrick was a fan, too-- he was trying to make his own film about jealousy, which would end up being EYES WIDE SHUT two decades later.)The real shame is that this film is the only Brooks effort never released on DVD. We can only hope that Criterion might rescue it from oblivion with a nice special edition (with commentary by Brooks!)

I love Albert Brooks. I cannot stress that enough. I was let down by this movie. Maybe I missed something? He breaks up "again" with his girlfriend and spends the rest of the movie pining for her and acting obsessively jealous.The whole Quaalude bit was just lame and not funny although when he puts on the disco record and says it's depressing was funny. Even though his girlfriend kept saying she loved and missed him I never believed it. I always felt she wanted to be somewhere else with someone else, so in the end when he asks her to get married and she says yes I couldn't believe it. I didn't feel Albert was up to his full neurotic obsessive potential, like he was holding back. O.K. movie but probably only bearable to Albert Brooks fans.